Origin: A coastal village on the Indian subcontinent
Tamasvi was born at twilight, the sky folding gently into sea, and her mother said:
“She came without a cry, like dusk itself—too wise for a child.”
Her family was neither cruel nor warm.
Her father honored duty. Her mother honored silence.
Her older brother, Viresh, was five years older and treated her like glass.
In her house, there was no room for error.
Emotions must be clean, folded, and put away.
She never wept where anyone could hear.
Every moment she disappointed was met with quiet disapproval, not rage.
But silence wounds just as deeply.
So she folded herself smaller, and smaller—until she nearly disappeared.
When she was twelve, she was sent away.
Tamasvi’s parents were born into servitude in the palace of a minor but proud sultan in a princely state of India — one not among the grandest, but one steeped in tradition, hierarchy, and honor codes older than memory.
They served with diligence and silence. For generations, their family tended to silks, spices, and secrets.
But Viresh, Tamasvi’s older brother, was not made for silence.
He was seventeen — fiery-eyed, bold, with a dangerous softness in him that the sultan’s eldest daughter noticed. She was the same age as Viresh, beautiful, bored, and locked behind jasmine-scented walls. The two began to speak behind columns, laugh at ceremonies, until one night they were found — laying together — by a eunuch servant loyal to the sultan.
The sultan, cold and pragmatic, demanded a vast financial compensation to ensure the matter remained buried. It was framed as a “gesture of respect,” but it was really a ransom for the family’s survival.
A merchant caravan offered a solution.
Her talents in weaving and perfumery were mentioned. So were “her small hands, her quiet manners.”
She was sold, not for a crime, but for one she didn’t commit.
• Her value, her body, her life — all reduced to a bargaining chip in a male-dominated world obsessed with shame and status.
• She internalized that the world would never see her as anything but a transaction.
• Since then, she’s carried a quiet storm: bitterness, control, fear of losing agency, a hatred of dishonesty, and an almost militant pride in her autonomy.
• She no longer speaks of her parents. Only of Viresh — and even then, rarely.
They said she would serve in a noble houses.
She dressed in new silks and kissed her mother’s hand.
She did not cry—because they didn’t want her to.
She was passed between hands like fine glassware—traded from one foreign man to another.
Egypt. Arabia. Somewhere with marble floors and hands that smelled like oil and old metal.
Eventually, she reached Ithaca, sold by a merchant as a rare domestic servant to Queen Penelope, who accepted her not with cruelty but with that tired, ocean-widowed gaze.
When she first arrived in Ithaca—barely eighteen, dust on her soles and sea in her mouth—she was more shadow than girl.
The coldness of the marble halls.
At first, she was afraid to speak. She carried her shame like a second skin—stiff, salted, stitched too tight.
Noticed the way she smoothed the linens with both palms. The way her hands never trembled, even when her eyes did.
Galene began to speak to her in soft, broken phrases.
Taught her words in Greek by holding herbs up and naming them.
Sometimes she would simply sit beside her in silence, like sisters who had never been born together.
Then came Melia, all cleverness and daring, and together, they took her “under their wings”—a phrase Melia whispered with a smirk one night as they shared a heel of honeyed bread in the servants’ corridor.
Tamasvi, who had only ever belonged to duty and silence, began to belong to something else.
A room where no one asked why you didn’t want to talk about home.
She dreams of Viresh sometimes.
But she doesn’t want to see him again.
He let her be sold—once, maybe twice.
To an Egyptian noble who beat her servants.
He told himself he was protecting her, but Tamasvi now knows:
“A brother who loves you doesn’t sell you like perfume.”
She no longer waits to be rescued.
She does not want to return.
Her world is here and now, among the other women, Among friends, among linen, oil, ash, and the warmth of things that do not ask questions.
Tamasvi has grown up watching Viresh burn himself down for love and guilt, and drag her with him every time. She hates him for it. She loves him too much to leave him. He’s her brother. But his presence is both her safety and her prison.
“He thinks he’s protecting me. But he’s just making me tired.”
Character mentioned in the story:
Hearts before the arrow - it's a game/ visual novel, that is momentarily being created by @messymoonmad